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According to Deans, the Presto card designed specifically for Ottawa is the envy of all, perhaps the best there is in North America.

“It seems that most of the (problem) issues we’ve identified have been addressed,” Deans said Tuesday after the city’s transit commission received on update on Presto.

Deans said Ottawa’s Presto card was designed to fit the city’s needs and does far more than, say, the card being in Toronto.

Not sure at this stage of the game, that Deans or anyone else at city hall should be hyping up the merits of the card.

It may be the best on paper, but of course, unless it turns out to actually work it’s not worth the cost of that paper.

“In terms of the functionally, it is the best. I’m not bragging about it, I’m just making the point.

“Yes, of course, it has to work,” Deans said.

And that of course is still the $32-million question.

City staff is about to hand out 10,000 free Presto cards.

(As Kanata Count. Marianne Wilkinson points out, residents should realize only the card itself is free you still use your own money to load up the cash.)

At this point, the card is working properly 98% of the time and they’re working at getting to 99%.

The question is how will those numbers stand up when thousands more are using the card?

Deans admits she feels more confident about the card’s success than she did several months ago.

“It’s getting better, I will be very happy to get to April, to layer on the 200,000 more cards and that happy the day I hear that it’s all working.

“All indications are that through this process we’re ironing out the kinks in the system. At the end of the day, it has to work, there’s nothing else. That’s the thing, you can’t just buy off the shelf,” she said.

Late last year, the city of Calgary cancelled its contract with their Connect card’s system provider, removing the new smart-card machines at all Calgary Transit 1,000 city buses and 160 LRT pay machines.

The decision was made after constant glitches and delays.

Does that sound familiar?

The tale of these two cities appears to be very similar. After two years of working with the Calgary office of Spain-headquartered Telvent, the city will let the firm take back its card readers and software.

The snafu had Calgary’s mayor and transit honchos apologizing for the failure to deliver the electronic far system.

The contract with Telvent, inked in December 2010, began showing signs of breakdown this spring.

With readers installed throughout the transit system, city employees were given plastic cards to try testing Connect. The machines would fail, and cards with money on them were read as invalid.

Again, the situation has been mirrored in Ottawa.

After missed deadlines last fall, the city had to send a “very powerful” message to other contractors, Mayor Naheed Nenshi told reporters at the time.

“There are performance benchmarks. There are things you have to meet and if you don’t meet them we’re not going to accept second-rate work for the citizens of Calgary.”

Again, sounds so eerily familiar.

But unlike Calgary, Ottawa continues to charge ahead.

“To develop a new system would take years. We’re this close to launching, to getting kinks out of the system,” Deans said, showing with her fingers how close she hopes they are.

She said if Presto fails, the system is set back five years.

Of course, it’s not just the card’s reputation that’s on the line.

Many are wondering if the city itself can really pull off a successful multi-million project.

Former Ottawa mayor and NCC board member
Jackie Holzman has lashed out at Mayor Jim
Watson, questioning why he didn’t intervene
earlier
on the recommendation of Tunney’s Pasture as
the
preferred site for a new Civic hospital.